[I hope that the unhappy reviewer who followed me (above) was not misled by my recommendation. I continue to use the program (I have no coonection with, or vested interest in, the company), and I find it the easiest and most effective among several that I've managed to collect (some of which no longer work nearly as efficiently as when I first got them). I've never tried to contact the company (have had no need), so I can't comment on service. I didn't know the company was in China (most are located in Eastern Europe). One slight irritant has caught my attention: the program tends to operate in the background, downloading and converting youtube videos that it was not my intention to collect. There may be a way to deactivate this feature.]
[2nd after-thought: perhaps the other reviewer and the person who gave me a negative have made the same discovery as I. I've been shopping for a DVD creator/burner on Google and in the App Store. 80% of the time the program I've inspected, and sometimes purchased, turns out to be another software program made by the same company WonderShare, which apparently does not want to disclose its identity more than necessary (Google a review before purchase). I continue to have pretty good success with this downloader (occasionally, "auto convert" does not change the file to one that my new iMac recognizes, so I'm deducting a star). But the hard-sell, often misleading tactics of this company are cause for concern. They apparently have up to 10 titles for the same program! And the prices will vary dramatically, from $20 to $50. Moreover, I was about to download one of their programs--away from Apple Store--until I got to the final step after giving my credit card and saw an additional fee: it was a $7 surcharge for having the program number of your purchase "stored" by the company for "all of" one year!! Compare that with Amazon, where I can call up purchases, invoice and order numbers from 10 or more years back. What if Amazon charged me $5 or more every time I looked up an order number! That little "extra fee" (I've never seen anything like it elsewhere) really turned me off on WonderShare. The company's going to have to perform wonders with my videos, DVDs, etc. before they win back my trust.];
Original Review:
I know several jazz fans who never get near computers and who are most grateful when I give them a DVD of jazz all-stars, whether Ella, Duke, and Dexter Gordon or Miles, Coltrane and Bill Evans. But unless you stay on top of this dicey business, it can become awfully time-consuming and far from consistent. Handbrake along with a tutorial on youtube can get you there for free, but it's got a learning curve. None of the pricey programs I had purchased in the past--most recently "Grappler"--were getting the job done without a lot of extra help from me. Then I gave Wondershare a spin. Smooth, flawless, automatic--and that's what you can presently do for free! After downloading 10 hours of concert material I practically felt I owed it to the developer to buy the program. You could use Wondershare for the downloading and find a free conversion program--but again we're talking more time and monkey business that I'm able to devote to the project.
At this stage, Wondershare strikes me as the fastest, easiest, most effective way to download youtube videos--try it yourself. If you like it, just keep it and use it with some coversion program--or pay the freight and make conversion as automatic and instant as downloading. It's hard to say whether the program will be as effective next year--by that time Google will probably have re-encoded youtube videos to assure no downloading except through their ever larger, greedier hands. So act fast. Download your favorite artists (it's disappointing to discover how many of the greats are not to be found on video anywhere) while it's still possible.
If you buy through Wondershare, they'll try to induce you to make a number of extra purchases. Ignore them, as well as the "warranty" (seven bucks). In fact, if you purchase from Amazon, they may have you covered should you lose the program.
[P.S. I suspect that other consumers will, like me, not want to spend an hour or so studying up on all of the compression codecs before selecting one for conversion purposes. I decided to waste several DVDs in order to find the best-looking one. My findings: MPEG-2 is as good as any, it's faster than a couple of others, and it holds more videos than some of the codecs boasting higher resolution and/or audio quality.]
Patrick
Samuel